Okay Business owners this one’s for you. What’s one of the most important things when
it comes to building your business? This
is an easy one. Like the saying goes “you
need money to make money.” Fair enough right?
Well, where do you get money if you don’t have any? Luckily I’ve been looking at a few sites for
loans and other types of financing. Two
sites I’d like to point out are ofn.org
and eda.gov. OFN (Opportunity Finance
Network) works with banks, foundations, and mission driven faith based
organization to provide funding to people in need. Mostly through bonding. “OFN provides
underwriting and monitoring services for third-party investments in CDFIs,
leveraging our decades of CDFI expertise to make it easier for institutional
investors to invest in CDFIs.” As a business owner this may be a company you’ll
want to check out. Using their services
can help you obtaining the financing you’re looking for. Signing up with OFN offers many benefits
including annual peer analysis of your CDFI’s performance, discounts on OFN
Regional meetings, discounts on OFN consulting services, as well as many other
services.
EDA (The U.S. Economic Development Administration) is a
government agency focused on economic development. By investing in businesses EDA is working to
increase regional development. “EDA
works directly with local economic development officials to make grant
investments that are well-defined, timely, and linked to a long-term,
sustainable economic development strategy.” EDA serves six regions, see below.
This site also provides a resource directory for each state
and annual reports. Programs such as the
Revolving
Loan Fund supply smalls business and entrepreneurs with gap financing. Some requirements to obtaining this type of
funding for a project are “the ability of the proposed project to realistically
achieve the desired results and catalyze additional resources, the ability of a
project to start quickly and create jobs faster, the extent to which the
project will enable the community/region to become more diversified and more economically
prosperous, and the relative economic distress of the region, as well as a few
more.” The requirements are pretty reasonable and the benefit is worth the
process. I definitely recommend for any
new business owner to check EDA out.
Below are some suggestions. Take a look.
- http://www.opportunityfinance.net/
- http://www.microenterpriseworks.org/
- http://www.cdfi.org/
- http://cfed.org/
- http://www.cdvca.org/
- http://www.ncif.org/
- http://www.eda.gov/
- http://www.firstnations.org
- http://www.oweesta.org/
- http://nvca.org
- http://www.inc.com
- https://www.sba.gov
